As the war in Ukraine has been unfolding on the battlefield, the Black Sea region has been assaulted with much cheaper instruments of destabilisation from Russia. Information and voter manipulation in key elections is an effective way to control a country’s geopolitical and economic policies.
Throughout this fall, three countries in the Black Sea region faced important electoral scrutiny: Georgia’s parliamentary elections, Moldova’s presidential elections and EU referendum and Romania’s presidential and parliamentary elections. All were heavily targeted by destabilising interferences from Russia.
Malign information manipulation by foreign powers follows a generic recipe of three key elements nowadays.
Firstly, it requires a large network of peers who trust and rely on each other, both online and offline. Whether it is the traditional clientelistic pyramids or the weaponisation of 'echo chambers', there has been a long-term investment from abroad into building such closely-tied groups.
Secondly, it requires a long-term feed of generic information (e.g. health, wellness, fitness, beauty, fashion, culture and religion) on social media channels (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp groups).
Micro-influencers are usually preferred to bigger names as bots build up their audiences and are easier to manipulate or cheaper to buy.
These have been set up months and years in advance of key elections in the Black Sea Region and elsewhere.
Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is the amplification campaign.
Like a 'flame' a couple of weeks or even days before election day, coordinated messages of support for a given political candidate (with a pro-Russian or pro-Chinese political agenda) are shared widely across the previously established online networks.
This is done under the supervision of public relations companies, that often seem to work on promoting the national brand abroad, when in fact engage in-depth in political campaigns by buying advertising, designing the messaging and coordinating its distribution via social media networks.
In addition to the online networks, dense grassroots clientelistic networks are also developed making the mobilisation tactics even more efficient.
Each of the three stages of foreign information manipulation and interference requires substantial financial resources that are not usually paid directly by foreign governments.
Funding for information manipulation campaigns often comes from organised criminal activities: video chat and gambling networks managed by Romanian-based pro-Russian criminal networks, or outward financial crime networks coordinated by the Israeli-born pro-Russian Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor.
Recent estimates place Ilan Shor’s financial investment in electoral mobilisation in Moldova at approximately $56.4m [€54.7m] since mid-2022.
Similarly, the personal wealth of Georgia’s Bidzina Ivanishvili is so large that he is single-handedly financing the propaganda machine behind his incumbent party Georgian Dream.
China is similarly funding its information manipulation operations with online scams involving video chat and cryptocurrencies run by Chinese criminal networks in the Philippines.
Malign interferences work only to the extent to which there are domestic structural vulnerabilities.
Democracy is perceived to be failing everywhere. Politicians are no longer able or willing to respond to popular wants and needs. Citizens often want different things from the ones they need, and presenting a rational political offer might not respond well enough to emotional triggers linked to fear of war, poverty, or respect.
Across the democracies in the Black Sea region, we can find similar domestic vulnerabilities: elite vanity and citizen’s fears.
The pro-European politicians are increasingly less able to understand and mobilize large segments of the population.
In Romania, Moldova or Georgia, there is roughly an equal split amongst the electorate, between pro-Western, undecided and the nationalist or fearing Russia’s retaliation if turning towards the West.
We often make the mistake of calling out the latter group as pro-Russian, when in fact, given the historical occupation of Romania, Moldova and Georgia by Russia, it is hard to find many overtly pro-Russian people in these countries.
The anti-Western or undecided segments are made up of people unable to connect to a Western cultural and political trajectory.
Pro-Western political elites, in contrast, have a categorical disdain for those who are not convinced of their superiority and do little to engage with these audiences, spending most of their time in Brussels or Washington DC. Should they spend more time in the regions, the mobilisation in favour of the pro-Western agenda might be larger.
Political elites’ vanity is also represented by the high fragmentation of the pro-Western candidates.
As much as president Salome Zourabishvilli tried to rally the pro-Western political forces behind her Georgian Charter of the country’s path to Euro-Atlantic integration. She fell short of a unified opposition bloc for the parliamentary elections this fall.
Maya Sandu’s political party PAS, is unlikely to be able to hold on to a majority in Moldova next year, without a coalition partner, while Romania’s pro-Western parties continue to be split despite the rise of the extreme-right bloc in parliament and presidential elections.
Pro-Western political parties in the Black Sea region seem increasingly ill-equipped to engage in this narrative competition with outdated pointers of public communication and poor delivery.
Most pro-Western politicians in Romania, Moldova or Georgia have been using opinion polls as a key barometer of what they should say, while pro-Russian campaigns dive much deeper into sentiment analysis sub-segmentation.
We know from the behavioural literature that information treatments are much less effective than monetary and social norms ones. In the Moldovan elections, telling people that the European Union is good was not a strong mobilising strategy. In contrast, financial incentives of just $100 or social norms that ascribe grassroots, neighbourhood-level clientelistic networks worked very well.
Russia is ironically weaponising popular fears against it to enhance support for political elites that would follow a pro-Russian agenda. Romanians, Moldovans and Georgians fear war with Russia and there is very little explanation from mainstream political parties on how this can be avoided.
As historically occupied territories by neighbouring empires — current day Russia, Hungary or Turkey — countries in the Black Sea region also have a strong emotional stance about foreign ownership of their land and natural resources or repression of religious liberties. While there is no rational link to European policies, malign narratives overlap the European integration process with these very deeply embedded emotional triggers.
When a country develops a new weapon technology it does not do so with only one adversary in mind.
The similarities between Chinese information manipulation campaigns in the Philippines and the Russian information manipulation campaigns in the Black Sea region are striking.
It is not just the Chinese TikTok platform and the Russian Telegram that were heavily used in these interference operations, but direct coordination from actors within Russia.
It is unlikely that the malign interference techniques, deployed in the Black Sea region, as in the Philippines, are likely to go away any time soon.
As we see the fine-tuning of destabilizing techniques supported by Russia and China, it should be no surprise that they will be deployed in the upcoming German or French elections in 2025.
Clara Volintiru is regional director for the Black Sea at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Clara Volintiru is regional director for the Black Sea at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.